What makes us musical animals?

A pair of gibbons sing together (credit: Andrew Walmsley / NPL)

Exploring the biological and social processes that underly our musical abilities, Nancy Ferranti talks to music researcher Henkjan Honing about the origins of music and musical behaviours. The podcast was broadcasted this morning at CKUT, a campus-community radio station based at McGill University.

The Next Big Thing? [Dutch]

In het afgelopen decennium zijn er ongelooflijke sprongen voorwaarts gemaakt in de wetenschap. Beeld je maar eens een leven zonder Wi-Fi in en het is moeilijk te geloven hoeveel we te weten zijn gekomen over Mars. We kunnen nu stamcellen programmeren, maar moeten we dit ethisch wel willen? En wat is de volgende stap? Hoeveel meer verbazingwekkende wetenschappelijke ontdekkingen zullen we zien aan het einde van het dit decennium? En hoe zullen die ons leven veranderen? In deze cursus komen vooraanstaande onderzoekers uit de menswetenschappen, levenswetenschappen en natuurwetenschappen aan het woord, en zij bespreken hoe de toekomst van de wetenschap eruitziet. Over The Next Big Thing in o.a. de natuurkunde, psychiatrie, klimaatwetenschap, media studies, nanotechnologie, muziekwetenschap, kunstmatige intelligentie, historische wetenschappen en psychologie. Naast interviews en lezingen van gastdocenten is er veel ruimte voor discussie.

Zie www.uva.nl/iis-colleges voor meer informatie.
Zie NRC Academie om te registreren.

Interested in a PhD in the Humanities at ILLC?

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) can nominate two candidates for a pre-selection procedure for the 2017 edition of NWO's PhDs in the Humanities programme. These could be internal UvA candidates from the MA Musicology, MSc Brain and Cognitive Science or any other relevant Master Programme, but excellent outside candidates will be considered as well.

For the internal ILLC selection, candidates should submit the following documents:

1. a brief (max 1 page A4) description of the proposed research, including the name of the proposed supervisor and promotor;
2. a CV of the candidate. These documents should be submitted by e-mail to the ILLC office: illc@uva.nl. 

The deadline for submitting these documents is January 2, 2017.

Is music a supernormal stimulus?

Fragment of an interview of Richard Dawkins with Steven Pinker for the documentary series The Genius of Charles Darwin (UK Channel 4 Television, 2008). Pinker explains again why music is not an adaptation, but should be seen as a kind of 'supernormal stimulus' - adding the phrase people in music hate this theory....

For a full one hour of uncut footage see here.

Honing, H. (2011). Muziek is geen luxe... maar wat dan wel? Academische Boekengids, 88, 2-4.

Honing, H. (2012). If music isn’t a luxury, what is it? Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 5 (1), 114-117 DOI: 10.1386/jmte.5.1.109_5. 

Interested in an Assistent Professorship in the Cognitive Sciences?

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is a research institute at the University of Amsterdam in which researchers from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities collaborate. Its central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. Research at ILLC is interdisciplinary, and aims at bringing together insights from various disciplines concerned with information and information processing, such as logic, mathematics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, music cognition and musicology.

Deadline: 4 November 2016.

See for more information here.

Join the 2017 real-time beat tracking competition?

Foot-tapping shoe competition at the 1994 ICMC in Aarhus, Denmark.

In 1994 we organized at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) a foot-tapping competition on the computational modeling of beat perception.  Several researchers had their latest models control a mechanical shoe, while listening to a variety of national anthems. (See the Dutch Clog in action in the picture above, and below the original prototype.)

At an upcoming IEEE conference a similar challenge will be held. I'm quite exited about that. It is intriguing to see that a skill that is apparently so trivial for humans continues to be a challenge for machines (cf. Honing, 2013).

A prototype tapping in the P.C.Hoofthuis at the
University of Amsterdam in 1993.

The goal of the IEEE challenge is to implement a real-time beat tracker on an embedded platform and to demonstrate the performance with a creative output such as, but not limited to, drumming, dancing, or flickering lights. It is challenging to perform beat tracking in real time because the complete signal is not available. It is also challenging because there can be a wide variety of musical input and the system needs to perform well on all of them. For more information on why beat perception / beat tracking is interesting, see Dan Levitin's This is your brain on music, cited in the IEEE Cup Challenge document.

Important Dates: November 7, 2016 - Registration Deadline
March 5-9, 2017 - Final Competition at ICASSP 2017

Detailed information can be found here.

Honing, H. (2013) Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4228-0.

Wat is het nut van een afgekeurd onderzoeksvoorstel? [Dutch]

Illustratie: Marc Kolle

"Schrijven van onderzoeksvoorstellen kost te veel tijd” kopte het NRC Handelsblad afgelopen week naar aanleiding van het verschijnen van de resultaten van een enquête van het wetenschappelijk bureau van de SP. Een meerderheid van de bevraagde wetenschappers blijkt zo’n twintig procent van de werktijd aan het schrijven van onderzoeksvoorstellen te besteden, met, zo wordt gemeld, weinig kans van slagen. Zonde van de tijd, lieten veel respondenten weten.

Onzin natuurlijk. Volgende week in Folia Magazine een reactie...

Want to join MCG in Amsterdam with a research fellowship?

The European Commission and the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) offers several fellowship opportunities for young researchers. See website for more information.

Interested in a PhD position at the UvA?

Recently new funds have been made available to the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Humanities through the so-called Sustainable Humanities programme (Duurzame Geesteswetenschappen). The faculty has decided to dedicate part of the funds to creating five new PhD positions (4 years, 0.8 fte each).

Previous contact with the Faculty of Humanities or possible supervisors is not necessary. International researchers are also encouraged to apply. Proposed projects must be relevant to one of the research schools within AIHR or to ILLC (in the case of music cognition related proposals).

Applications should include a description of the proposed research project (max. 2500 words, written in English), a full academic CV, and a list of MA/MSc grades (see link below for more information). Applicants must have a completed Master’s degree in a relevant field before the start date of the fellowship.

See website for more information.

N.B. The deadline for applications is 15 August 2016

Update 22 August:The faculty received 600 applications. Applicants will be informed on the outcome before October 1st.

Another one bites the dust?

A Tsimane' man plays the flute (from: McDermott et al., 2016).

The music theory literature has been suggesting it for a long time: the idea that simultaneously sounding tones with frequency relationships that are low integer multiples, like 1:2 (octave) or 3:2 (a perfect fifth), are determinant of how listeners perceive consonance. It is an idea that is often related to the overtone structure of natural sounds (such as the voice or string instruments) suggesting that musical harmony is reflective or even a result of the acoustic structure that is found in natural, harmonic sounds that are surrounding us (see earlier entries).

However, a study that was published in Nature today, makes both ideas quite unlikely (McDermott et al., 2016). The authors conclude that "consonance preferences are unlikely to be innate, and that they are not driven by exposure to harmonic natural sounds such as vocalizations." Instead, consonance preferences seem to depend on exposure to particular types of music, presumably those that feature consonant harmony. In an elegantly controlled study McDermott and colleagues compared the perception of musical, speech and natural sounds in North American listeners (both musicians and non-musicians) and compared them to two groups of Bolivian listeners, of which one group rarely is in contact with Western culture, a tribe named Tsimane' (Chimane).

All participants rated the pleasantness of sounds. Despite exhibiting Western-like discrimination abilities and Western-like aesthetic responses to familiar sounds and acoustic roughness, the Tsimane’ rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant. By contrast, Bolivian city- and town-dwellers exhibited significant preferences for consonance, albeit to a lesser degree than North American listeners. The results indicate that consonance preferences can be absent in cultures sufficiently isolated from Western music, and are thus unlikely to reflect innate biases or exposure to harmonic natural sounds. It seems we can remove 'consonance perception' from our list of candidate constituent elements that might underlie the human predisposition for music, i.e. musicality (see Honing et al., 2015).

UPDATE: Related news article in Dutch.

McDermott, J. H., Schultz, A. F., Undurraga, E. A., & Godoy, R. A. (2016). Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. Nature, 525, 7611. DOI: 10.1038/nature18635.

Honing, H., ten Cate, C., Peretz, I., & Trehub, S. (2015). Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1664), 20140088-20140088 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0088